


With a Bang

by justanothersong



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Graphic Description, Major Character Injury, Pining
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-21
Updated: 2018-07-25
Packaged: 2018-11-16 19:09:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11259135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justanothersong/pseuds/justanothersong
Summary: And there it was again. That little nagging thought, that little rush of affection, the one thing you had been trying so hard to ignore for so long, stuffed down into the darkest recesses of of your heart and fit to stay there if not for this.





	1. Chapter 1

It started out with a bang, but then it always does, doesn’t it?

One moment, you were catching your breath as the dust settled, surrounded by an array of broken and moaning bodies on the floor, and the next thing you knew…

The bang game from some sort of crossbow that you hadn’t seen, half-hidden beneath one of the bodies on the ground. It was followed by the sharp whir of the Captain’s shield sailing through their air, and a sickening cracking sound when it connected with its target: the back of the neck of the man who had shot you.

That’s when you realized it -- that you had been shot. You looked down slowly in surprise, seemingly dumbfounded to see the seven or so inches of lightweight metal sticking out from your ribs. Without thinking much on it, you raised one hand to the piece of the crossbow bolt protruding from your torso and tried to pull it. You thought you heard someone calling your name, telling you to stop, but everything seemed to muted and far away that you couldn’t really be sure. There was a strange ringing in your ears and a surge of the worst pain you had ever felt, and you let loose your grip on the bolt after pulling only a single bloody inch of the thing out.

Your knees buckled; you thought you were vomiting as you fell but realized with only mild interest that it was just blood dripping from your mouth as you hit the ground. It went very quiet then, and the world got too bright and hazy for you to follow.

 

You snapped back to consciousness with a scream of pain. Steve was hovered over you, blood all over his hands and splattered on his face, and you realized with a sudden jolt of turbulence that you were back in the jet, in the air.

“Fucking hell,” Steve spat out, packing gauze around the protruding bolt. “I think the damn thing has an expandable blade like the one I pulled off of…” he trailed off, his eyes falling on your face as you woke and his voice softening.

“Hey you,” he said, giving you a weak smile. “Glad to see you’re back with us.”

“Where…” you started, then coughed as more blood rose in your throat to burble out your mouth. The pain was excruciating, the jolts sharp and unceasing as each hacking cough wracked your frame and jostled the bolt.

“No, honey, don’t try to talk, okay?” Steve said in what it was clear he hoped to be a soothing tone. He helped you lay back, the coughing fit having made you curve up into a half-sitting position and put more pressure on the bolt in your ribs.

The plane hit another pocket of turbulence and you gasped in pain at the movement.

Steve’s head immediately snapped back towards the cockpit. “Jesus Christ, Clint, can you keep this thing steady?”

“I’m tryin’, I’m tryin’,” Clint Barton shouted back from the controls. You almost smiled; you knew that Steve liked to remain as much in command as possible on missions, would take point and helm any vehicle necessary, and it meant something that he had given up that control to stay by your side.

And there it was again. That little nagging thought, that little rush of affection, the one thing you had been trying so hard to ignore for so long, stuffed down into the darkest recesses of of your heart and fit to stay there if not for this. 

Your life was a lot different than it had been before you joined the Avengers, and you had grudgingly come to accept that. To the most of the world, you were almost untouchable, and to the rest, you had a target painted on your back. The relationships you forged were strong and all but sacred; your relationships with the others -- your teammates and friends -- could mean the difference between life and death in the field.

You had liked them all well enough upon being drawn into their ranks, but had grown to love them dearly and fiercely. You realized that no one else would ever understand you like they could. A fight among you was tantamount to treason. You were careful to protect those relationships at all costs.

It wasn’t easy admitting to anyone, least of all yourself, that you had fallen in love with one of your best friends.

You had heard that your life would flash before your eyes when the end was drawing near and it seemed to do that now, a thousand memories of the time you spent at Steve’s side, working in the field or just spending down time together. 

His smiles.

His eyes. 

The way he would laugh so deep sometimes at some terrible joke you had cracked, throwing his head back and reaching to touch your arm is if grounding himself.

The words you had barely heard, when consciousness was kept a breath away and you couldn’t open your eyes, even as he carried you to safety:

“Stay with me, honey. Not long now, just stay with me, I’ll get you home.”

 

You took a deep breath, trying to take your mind away from the sharp pain pulsing throughout your body and the cold, numb feeling spreading from your fingertips and toes. Steve was keeping pressure around your wound, piles of bloody gauze from the med kit that was kept on the plane, and his expression was tense and worried.

“I think that last jolt tore the skin a little more,” he said, and reached to push the tattered edges of your suit away from the wound, swearing at what he saw. 

“That bad?” you asked, swallowing back another thick clot of blood creeping up your throat.

Steve seemed to be thinking, staring down for a moment before he came to a decision, and tore open your suit. He swore again and it made you more nervous; you were feeling hazy again, so much so that it didn’t even bother you to be exposed, the simple bra you were, once white, down stained deep and crusted over with your blood.

“If you really wanted to… see me topless, Steve… you could’ve… could’ve just bought me a drink,” you said, smiling at your own terrible joke.

Steve gave a laugh that sounded more like a sob. “C’mon now doll, I’m a gentleman,” he told you, half a smile on his face. “I’d at least buy you dinner.”

You wanted to laugh but could only gurgle in response; you knew you were bleeding into your esophagus, so it wouldn’t be long now. Everything seemed so clear to you now.

“Steve,” you said, ignoring the slick coppery taste of blood on your lips. You reached up with a cold shaky hand and clasped it over his where he still tried to put pressure on your wound. “I have.. to... have to tell you…” you started.

“No,” Steve responded suddenly, voice harsh and coldly clinical, his ‘Captain’ voice, you used to tease him, shocking enough to stop you, your eyes widening in surprise.

Steve’s expression softened. “No,” he repeated, voice almost pleading. “No, not now. You can tell me later. You can tell me when we get home and we get you checked out, okay? You can tell me then.”

Tears pricked at your eyes. “Please,” you told him. “Ne-need to… tell you… before I…”

Steve bowed his head, his hair falling in his face. You wanted to reach up and run your fingers through it but you couldn’t gather the strength. It was ebbing away from you and you wanted to scream in frustration, trapped in your own failing body, needing so badly to tell him.

“We’ll have time,” Steve said, voice cracking on the words. “We’ll have time, we will. We’re gonna get you home.”  
You wished with all your heart that was true, and gave him the best smile you could muster before you gave into the darkness that had been creeping at the edges of your vision. Your eyes closed and shook loose a few final tears. 

As you gave a last shallow sigh, you could distantly hear Steve calling your name.


	2. Chapter 2

Wakefulness was painful and nauseating, and if you could escape it, you would have, but it was an ever-present nagging at the back of your mind. The lights didn’t help, seemingly blinding even from behind your eyelids. Everything hurt but at least you were warm; you could feel the blankets tucked in tight around you, and you sighed softly at that little bit of comfort. 

At least you were home. At least you were safe.

“Are you waking up?” an exhausted voice asked in a low, quiet tone. Your eyelids felt as though they weighed forty pounds each but you struggled to open them anyway, knowing immediately who was sitting at your bedside.

Steve gave you a tired smile. “Didn’t I tell you I’d get you home?” he asked.

 

Steve looked about as bad as you felt. The bags beneath his red-rimmed eyes were deep and dark, hair messy and looking in dire need of a good wash. There was a fair amount of stubble on his cheeks and in spite of his tiredness, the look seemed to suit him; you made a mental note to tell him that later. The t-shirt he wore was ill-fitting, too wide at the collar and too short in the torso, the drawstring of his sweatpants pulled tight at his narrow waist. The clothes were clean but the rest of him wasn’t; there was dried blood splattered across his face, on his hands and up his forearms. It was even in his hair.

It was yours, you realized. Your blood.

“Oh god,” you muttered, wincing as you tried to turn in bed. “Steve, how long have you been here?”

He tried to give a casual shrug and winced himself, body clearly aching and stiff from sitting in the uncomfortable chair at your bedside for far too long.

“Just… uh… y’know, a couple days,” he offered with a small crooked smile. 

Your lips parted and you made a soft noise of surprise and affection, reaching one shaking hand out against your blankets, fingers uncurled and beckoning. Steve took it immediately, the size of his palm against yours seeming to dwarf it, his fingertips gently stroking your wrist, carefully avoiding the IV placed nearby.  
You had so much you wanted to say, the words welling up inside you; Steve had promised you time for it, time to get you home and time to say all the things you needed, but now that you were there together in the quiet of your sickroom, you didn’t seem to know what to say. Your eyes followed the IV tubing in your hand, up to a drip bag attached to a machine. You frowned, your attention diverted from the looming conversation and instead upon the medication steadily dripping into your veins.

“It’s a morphine drip,” Steve advised quietly, fingers still stroking your wrist. “You were in a lot of pain after surgery.”

“Oh no…” you muttered, realizing the source of your nausea.

Steve frowned. “What’s wrong, sweetheart? Should I call the doctor?”

“No, I just… m’not good with morphine,” you tried to explain, wincing as you struggled to sit up, pressing your lips together and trying to take a few deep breaths through your nose. Steve understood immediately and reached for a plastic basin in a nearby cupboard. He brought it to you seemingly just in time, and smoothed your hair away from your face while you emptied your stomach in the basin. It was mostly bile and acid, making you gag harder; Steve, ever the gentleman, simply stood beside you, rubbing your back and helping you to hold up the basin.

“This is so embarrassing,” you grumbled, trying your best to ignore the throbbing pain seemingly all over your abdomen. Steve laughed gently and poured you a glass of water from the pitcher on your hospital tray. 

“It shouldn’t be,” he told you. “Just means you’re on the mend. Why don’t you get some rest?”

You sighed and closed your eyes, leaning back against your pillows. “But we have to talk,” you protested, even as you felt your exhaustion tugging away at the edges of your consciousness.

You heard Steve’s footsteps and felt his fingers in your hair. “We have all the time in the world. We’ll talk when you wake up.”

 

As it happened, you didn’t wake up for another three days. Bruce explained it to you when you finally reached consciousness again: when you’d gotten ill from the morphine drip, the spasms in your abdomen had torn some internal sutures. As you fell asleep, you’d been bleeding into your belly.

You’d crashed on the table when they went in to repair it.

“Steve was torturing himself over it,” Bruce told you, not unkindly, when you were finally back on the mend. Though he wasn’t your physician, he still couldn’t help but go through the motions, taking your pulse as he spoke and squinting to judge the color in your face.

“Wasn’t his fault!” you protested, frowning at the thought that Steve would blame himself over something that had been nothing more than an unfortunate accident.

Bruce used the opportunity to place an old-fashioned glass thermometer under your tongue; he never did trust the electronic ones.

“I told him that,” he advised. “We all did. He just kept saying that if he’d stuck around a little longer, he’d have seen the bloody discharge from your chest tube. We were about ready to order him out of your room as it was… serum or not, he needed some rest.”

 

You recovered. It wasn’t easy, but you made it. Steve seemed to spend as much time at your side as he could, unless missions took him away or you shooed him for the sake of privacy. He waited outside the door when they pulled out your chest tube and crushed the doorknob in his hand when he heard you cry out.

When they decided you were well enough to get on your feet and move around, Steve was right there at your side. The first day you were cleared to go back to your own room, Steve was so thrilled with the process in your recovery that he pulled you close and just held you for a while.

He was trembling, you realized, just the slightest bit. You could feel the gentle shudder in his shoulders as you returned his embrace. It occurred to you then, for the first time, that maybe, just maybe, Steve had been afraid of losing you.


	3. Chapter 3

It seemed as though your life had been put on pause. All around you, the world continued turning unabated, but you were stuck in a holding pattern, waiting for your sluggish body to knit itself back together properly. It was infuriating.

You’d been hurt before, but this was probably the worst of it. Shot, stabbed, sliced, concussed… all through-and-through simple wounds that, while dangerous, had healed quickly enough once treated. This one was a little more delicate; Steve had been right on the plane, when he noted that the tip of the bolt may have expanded. Six razor sharp blades had sprung free from it once it was lodged inside you, injuring you even further still when you attempted to remove it in your dazed state. 

It was nothing short of a small miracle that you had survived the wound at all. The medical staff told you that you would have bled out before ever reaching them if not for Steve keeping constant pressure on the wound.

It certainly wasn’t the first time you found yourself owing him your life.

 

So you drifted, while the others worked. Once you were allowed to leave the med bay, you spent a considerable amount of time in your pajamas, breezing through a few different tv series you’d been meaning to watch and generally finding ways to kill the time. It could be maddening, when the compound was empty, no one left to distract you but FRIDAY -- and even that got old pretty quick. You found yourself getting short-tempered, and easily irritated; the boredom, coupled with the frantic energy you were unable to burn while still on a limited physical regimen that wouldn’t allow for you to do so much as jog around the courtyard. 

The others were all away when you were finally cleared to resume normal physical activities; you still weren’t allowed to go to work, but you needed to recondition your body after the weeks of sitting around, losing muscle mass, so you decided to spend your time in the gym.

The equipment seemed daunting, after having been sidelined for so long. You decided to take it easy, running through some simple aerobic exercises on the mats to get your heartrate up before moving into some strengthening moves. It was difficult at first, your muscles taut and stubborn from disuse, but they slowly seemed to warm up to the activity and you found yourself in one of the best moods you’d had in days.

You turned over after a rep of push-ups and positioned yourself to start a round of sit-ups, pausing and taking a deep breath to steel yourself before beginning. Your incisions had healed but you knew your abdomen and chest were still tender. The bending motion of the exercise was sure to be at least a little painful.

“Knew I’d find you here,” a voice called, and you propped yourself up on your elbows to see where it came from. You couldn’t help the smile that broke out on your face when you saw Steve standing in the doorway; he was dressed in sweats and a t-shirt but still carried his mission gear bag over his shoulder. He must have only just returned.

“I haven’t been able to do so much as tie my own shoes in weeks,” you replied with a laugh. “Of course I’m here. I’m happy just to be able to jog at this point.”

Steve dropped his gear bag beside the door and ambled over your way. “Want a spotter?” he offered, and you nodded in agreement, dropping back to the mats until you felt the warmth of his hands on your ankles. You felt your cheeks go warm at the touch but you hoped he’d assume it was from the exertion.

You made small talk, best as you could given the circumstance. Your breaths came fast and rough, the reconditioning clearly necessary as you struggled now and again. Worse still were the words unsaid, the ones left hanging in the air unspoken. Steve had promised there would be time enough to talk, but neither of you had made any attempts. You were still puzzling over just how to broach the topic when Steve seemed to make the decision to move past words all together.

On the upward motion of your rep, Steve’s hands left your ankles and instead reached over to take your face in his hands -- large, warm hands, calloused from battle but still gentle and elegant with an artist’s touch -- and pressed his lips to yours. 

You gasped but just as quickly surrendered to the kiss, gentle and sweet, his lips moving against yours in a soft, sensual symphony. It wasn’t what you would have expected; Steve was typically clean shaven but bore the stubble of a long stretch in the field, the pleasant burn of it enough to make you shiver. He was more confident than you might have imagined and you found that you enjoyed it, submitting to his leisurely pace and mewling softly, almost in a whimper, only to shiver again at his answering groan. 

You broke his kiss only to take a breath, your eyes fluttering open to see Steve smiling, leaned over you on the exercise mats. You relaxed your knees to lean back, allowing Steve to stretch out beside you, face turned towards you with a smile.

“Not going to talk about it, then?” you asked, feeling almost shy.

Propped up on his elbow beside you, Steve searched your expression, seemingly unsure for a moment if he had done the right thing. Finding no objection there, only an open and earnest expression, his smile grew. He reached out and tucked a lock of hair, slipped loose from your usual workout ponytail, behind your ear.

“I couldn’t wait anymore,” he admitted. “Every time I’ve suited up since you were hurt, all I could think was that if something happened, I might never get the chance. Everything I’ve wanted to tell you. Every time I’ve wanted to kiss you, to hold you… I’d wasted so much time already. I couldn’t take the chance.”

Your heart caught in your throat. _Every time_ , he had said. _Every time_. You weren’t alone in it then -- what you were feeling. That had been the silent spectre haunting your thoughts, that Steve had hushed you on the plane to save you the embarrassment of a confession of unrequited love. Now it seemed your own hesitation had been completely unnecessary.

“Every time?” you asked, eyes a little wide, a little hopeful.

“Every time you laugh,” Steve told you, blue eyes taking on a dreamy expression as he spoke. “Every time you smile. Every time you turned up at breakfast wearing a t-shirt with a picture of my shield, or I came into the kitchen early on a Sunday and you were there with a cup of coffee waiting for me, just how I like it.”

You laughed softly. “You take it black, Steve. It’s not so hard to remember.”

“Black, with an ice cube, because I don’t have the patience for it to cool and I’m liable to burn myself on it,” he corrected. “With a spoon even though there’s nothing to stir in, because it gives me something to do with my hands. You remember all of that, every time.”

“So I remember your coffee order,” you told him. “How is that enough to make you… you…”

“Love you?” he offered, and you ducked your head, the words too much for you to look him in the eye. “That’s what you wanted to tell me, wasn’t it? When I told you to wait, when you were bleeding out in my arms.”

“Did you know?” you asked, voice dropped almost to a whisper. You glanced up at him, biting your lip. “Before then, before I… before I tried to tell you. Did you know?”

Steve smiled. “I’d hoped. Prayed, even. Not something I do often anymore, but that was somethin’ worth praying for. But I didn’t know, not until then. And I wasn’t going to lose you then, not when I just found out. Not when we could have so much to look forward to.”

You dipped forward to kiss him gently, feeling the way he smiled against your lips before parting his own just slightly in invitation; it wasn’t one you would ever refuse.


End file.
